Why not prefer apartments in my town?
I sometimes have a dog who likes the yard, drummer, and my rental house is half the rent of an equivalent apartment.
You can still have trees and plant life in low density housing. You don’t need green deserts everywhere.
Yeah fuck lawns too, they aren’t meant to exist
But you still need way more infrastructure for the Houses.
Yup, tons more parking and tons more road space per capita as well. Low-density sprawl just needs a lot more stuff per capita.
They should pay a significant land tax instead of leeching off the high-density dwellers.
Why not prefer apartments in your own town?
Noise. Neighbours being closer.
The issue is that all of those apartments are owned by one person getting filthy fucking rich from rent.
Then organise the renters, let them buy the house to transform it into syndicate or cooperative housing. Social apartment construction isn’t impossible.
What a fuckin great idea. Immediate downside is who’s in charge of the bills?
ask yourself this: if the apartment is owned by a company who is in charge of bills?
in the case witht he syndicate, the syndicate is in charge of the bills, the bills are split up among the members, this stuff all already exists btw.
bro a significant percentage of swedes live in housing co-ops, it’s literally a normal form of housing here, you’re not clever.
Sorry, but fuck this idea in its entirety. This would allow for MORE apartment buildings to be built, since that is how capitalism works, which results in more damage to the surrounding wildlife. L
We need more regulations, and we need a more conscious approach to our housing in general. We should be approaching this with symbiosis in mind, cooperating with nature rather than bending it to our will.
Those houses on the left? Yeah, you could cram so many actual gardens that give you actual food and which could bring so much biodiversity, but we sticking to flat, pure grass gardens that do nothing other than be flat and look green. Fuck everything here.
Blocks of flats are awful places. No garden to put up a workshed, or greenhouse or anything at all, or play with your dog or kids (and no dog - it would be cruel to keep a dog in a flat and not have it able to roam a garden all day), they’re noisy, loud neighbours can be above, below, to the left, to the right, and in front …
You can’t modify your home how you’d like, can’t choose what utility companies run into your home, can’t let your kid cycle up and down the street and still be able to see and hear them from the windows etc.
I see your point about density absolutely, but I HATE flats. Awful places.
I also hate how people have started trying to make them sound fancy and posh by calling them “apartments” to try to sound fancy and European/French, as if that will make them more appealing.
Sounds like a literal nightmare to me. No garden to enjoy. No vegetables. No privacy. No ability to get solar panels.
No room for improvement. Basement second levels. Changing plumbing windows etc. No ability to charge your ev.
Fuck is this some corporate bullshit
No garden to enjoy.
Community garden/allotments, parks, nature.
No vegetables
Community supported agriculture (CSA), community gardens/allotments.
No privacy
I guess this sentiment stems from US-American toilet stalls, but apartments have walls and doors. I heard HOAs, neighbours are very good at privacy in suburban housing.
No ability to get solar panels.
‘Balkonkraftwerke’, roughly balcony power plants, are solar panels that can be installed to a regular outlet given the right electricity meter.
No room for improvement.
Ugly version: No hurry, landlords do that to you.
Slightly better version: House community decides consensually.
Better version: Housing cooperative helps you within limits.
No EV charging.
a) Likely untrue, especially with newer buildings. b) Likely unnecessary, because there’s little need due to bicycles, public transport or car sharing and all services within short reach. Electric bicycles, cargo bicycles exist.
The US has about 10 million square kilometers
That’s 10 million x 1 million square meters (10^13 )
There will soon be (source: people like sex) 10 billion people on earth (10^10 )
This would give you 10^13 / 10^10 = 10^3 square meters (10700 square feet) of land for everyone on earth to live on. EVERY SINGLE PERSON. Not families, individual fucking people.
All of them contained within the US.
10700 square feet to build a house, have a small garden etc. Okay, not a lot. But that’s one country that could house everyone. An extreme example of course - you’re not gonna be able to use all that land, some of it is uninhabitable (red states lol). But just imagine it for a second, everyone living in one country would still be comfortable. And look how much is left of the rest of the world.
1000 square meters isn’t enough space? Make your house have 4 stories, who gives a shit, make your own wizard tower. In a relationship? That’s 21400 square feet for the couple. Have a couple of kids? 42800 square feet. That’s a decent enough house+yard for 4 people, especially if you add one or two floors.
The problem is not that there isn’t enough space. The problem is that some motherfuckers want and get more than their share of square feet. And then they charge you money to live in their share of land without owning it.
I spent seven years living in an apartment. I so enjoyed hearing the neighbors having sex, the thumping music they played, the smell of their cigarette smoke inside my apartment with all my windows closed, the random intrusions by management to repair something unrelated to my apartment, the random rent increases. Add this to the fact that I had no space for a work shop to make anything, and paying the equivalent of a mortgage with no equivalent home equity. Some people love apartment life, but it definitely was not for me.
You hate shitty apartments, not apartments.
If only there were good apartments available that people could afford.
I’ve never been able to afford anything else
I truly am sorry to hear that. But the unfortunately all to common practice of shitty land lords building shitty buildings for quick money should (hopefully) not be what we are aiming for in the future. Landlords were able to get away with far too much for far too long because everyone wasn’t connected and able to video everything. Hopefully, again, it changes now
I don’t have any of the problems mentioned by the first commenter and I live in a relatively cheap apartment. I don’t even hear the people in the other room in my own apartment if I have doors and windows closed. That’s better than some houses I’ve been to and lived in.
How old is your building? Is it “stick-built” (wood frame construction) or something else? Are the walls plaster or drywall? Older construction tends to have quieter walls (but louder floors, in my experience).
Good luck to the apartment dwellers when the next wave of COVID hits.
![[meme] How would you rather see this land developed?](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/f6ec67a5-2636-4875-8dd4-fa5241a3083c.jpeg){kind=link}